Good leaders buy low, sell high
Challenges in leadership and investing:
Plain common sense tells us we should buy when times are bad and sell
when times are good. But how we actually behave couldn't be farther from
that.
We find it comforting to buy during good times and sell during bad.
Why? Partly because we take comfort in being part of the herd.
If everyone's buying, then there must be sense in it. And partly
because we expect whatever times we're in, good or bad, to last forever.
Seldom do we try very hard to see beyond the immediate horizon.
Yet that is exactly what good leaders are all about-being
contrarians, perceiving what is distant and doing what is right rather
than what everybody else is doing.
Thus a good leader is like a good investor. He buys low and sells
high. An investor does this in the world of financial instruments to
make a profit; a leader does it in conceptualizing and developing ideas.
When a good idea is born, it's usually like an underpriced stock,
perhaps because it's ahead of its time or because the times are bad. But
a leader supports it and adds value to it until the time comes for its
fruition. He sees what isn't obvious in it and strives to create what
isn't there yet at all, by betting on its hidden potential. He
undertakes the act of converting something worthless in the present into
something precious in the future. His actions are nothing but decisions
to buy low and sell high.
What does this mean in a time like the present?
Buying low means looking into the future. True leadership is about
committing your present to a future whose value appears low at the
moment but you believe it can be high.
Visionary leaders see the potential in a thing before it's obvious.
They look for what is not there, what has not been said, what has not
been done, and they imagine how things could or should be. Buying low
means defying the crowd. George Bernard Shaw wrote, "All progress
depends on the unreasonable man." That means the true leader is an
unreasonable man. A reasonable man adapts to the world; an unreasonable
man tries to adapt the world to himself. He produces and supports ideas
that go against the crowd, buying low, selling high, doing the opposite
of what the world is doing-even when those ideas appear to most as
bizarre, useless and even foolish.
Leadership takeaway: Leadership is the art of buying low and selling
high. There is no better time to buy into an idea than when the times
are bad.
Forbes.com |